Products such as personal video recorders (PVRs), game consoles and the like whose operation entails processing data often include internal data storage, such as an internal hard disk drive (HDD). In addition, such products often have a data port for attaching an external direct-attached storage (DAS) system to increase the data storage capacity of the product. Such a data port is typically a universal serial bus (USB) port, an external serial advanced technology attachment (eSATA) port, or an IEEE 1394 (Firewire) port. The DAS system can include a disk enclosure containing one or more hard disk drives (HDDs).
Typically, there is no user interface provided with the PVR or other product to which the DAS system is attached to configure the DAS system. Therefore, such DAS systems are generally configured for a particular non-varying data storage scheme. For example, the storage assets of a DAS system might comprise two HDDs configured as a single concatenated volume. Such a configuration does not provide data protection in the event of a failure of one of the drives, and if one of the drives fails data will be lost. Alternatively, the two HDDs might be configured as mirrored disks, which provides data protection, and if one of the drives fails data will not be lost.
DAS storage expansion systems exist that can support and can be configured and/or reconfigured to implement one of various storage schemes, such as a single or nested RAID (“Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks”) mode (0, 1, 5, 10 etc.), JBOD (“just a bunch of disks”) or Big/Concatenated single volume configuration. Some such DAS systems include a hardware mechanism for selecting the particular storage scheme the product will implement, such as a DIP switch or rotational switch.
However, if a user wants to apportion the storage assets of a DAS storage expansion system to simultaneously use more than one storage scheme, there is presently no product with a hardware mechanism directly on the product that provides this capability. For example, using existing DAS systems, there is no way a user can apportion 30% of the storage assets in the system to a protected mode (such as RAID 1 or RAID 5) and 70% of the storage to a single concatenated volume, using mechanism provided on the DAS system. Thus, there is a need for a DAS system that can be configured and/or reconfigured via a hardware mechanism on the DAS system to simultaneously implement more than one data storage scheme.